Remote collaboration

The experience in the T Sector

“Increase productivity, save time and money while reducing your company’s carbon footprint.” This is the ambitious objective of a family of tools that promise to facilitate communication, collaboration and coordination — without the requirement of physical travel. For ITU, whose basic mission is to encourage collaborative work among a global membership, remote collaboration is a daily necessity.

Remote collaboration tools are designed to help two or more participants involved in a common task to achieve their goals. To do this, they combine many different applications such as audio and videoconferencing, instant messaging and chats, multi-user editors, white boards and revision control. Collaborators remotely share access to local devices for presentation and interaction (for example, a desktop, keyboard and mouse) and software (office applications, web applications, in-house software) to view, annotate and edit content in real time, through synchronous participation from different locations.

Remote collaboration tools differentiate between two main modes of operation with variations on each according to the size of the meeting:

In peer-to-peer meetings, the organizer and participants may interact (two-way communication) by following an agenda, communicating with the help of audio, video and text, and jointly editing documents. ITU is using this type of remote collaboration for some meetings of steering committees and study groups.

Webinars (web seminars), often used for product presentations or the transmission of conferences, tend to involve mostly one-way communication, from speaker to audience. Many ITU workshops are available online as webcast. Archives for future reference, evaluation, or training purposes, and live feeds can be found at www.itu.int/ibs/.

The majority of ITU meetings take place in Geneva, Switzerland. Given the international nature of the work — with Member States, Sector Members and Associates from 191 countries around the globe — many delegates must travel long distances to participate in meetings, even though they may sometimes only be interested in one brief part of a meeting. For example, nearly two-thirds of delegates travelled round trip more than 10 000 km to participate in ITU–T meetings in 2007 (see Figure  5 for detailed ITU–T meeting statistics). Holding even a small number of those meetings online would have a significant impact on ITU’s carbon footprint, considering that air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause climate change.

Figure 5 — Potential for remote collaboration in ITU–T’s activities Meetings, meeting days and average length of meetings, 2003–2007 (left chart) and distance travelled by delegates in 2007 (right chart) Source: ITU.

Furthermore, ITU workshops and tutorials held online can address a wider audience, notably in reaching participants from developing countries, and non-members. For developing countries, remote collaboration tools can thus be seen as a helpful instrument in overcoming the digital divide and in “Bridging the Standardization Gap”. Specific types of remote collaboration tools (for instance, facilitating remote interpretation, or remote captioning) have also allowed more ITU meetings to be held away from the headquarters in Geneva.